It shows the blinking cursor right before it starts the boot process, so something is halting it. I was wondering if you had a TPM chip, or other security device on your system. Or, did you ever have Bitlocker installed?
Unlock a BitLocker-protected drive
Something I noticed was my first partition is 350 MB and keeps reverting back to something in Spanish even after I delete it and reformat it. I wonder if maybe my system is booting into that? It's never been there before.That link is no help, it assumes you can get into Win 8.
How To Remove BitLocker Encryption in Windows 7 - Unlock For Us
Try SIW2's link - That looks promising
Sounds like a virus of some sort, it's possible. If you can boot to Hiren's there are Anti Virus programs on the disk. Windows 7 needed to make some sort of 100 MB partition which held the grub loader, Windows 8 does not need to do this, so that 350mb partition ought not to be there.
If you can get into Hiren's and if Hiren's can access the drive, you can connect it to the Net and download Partition Wizard Home version 7.x- You can try to use that to expand the System partition to full disk size.
I used to get shifty installers all the time, even from sites like cNet :/ I had one that installed a hidden version of mIRC, which connected to my Intuit folder and tried to send the contents to a remote IP address. Fortunately, I wasn't using Quicken at the time.
A rootkit sometimes will not show up in an AV scan, they get into your system and lock out things like Windows Firewall and prevent you from running any other AV programs. But you can only run a rootkit check on a drive from within the OS on that drive, there are ways to scan for them from without, but it's difficult. But this spanish partition, it's got to be part of your problem. Did you ever install Windows 8 using Spanish as the first language? Or, maybe the installer was in Spanish and you added English?
I found this recovery disk tool, I'm going to download it and see if it's useful:
Windows 7/8 - OEM Recovery Partition Creator
I'll check it out and ask Shawn if we can use it for official forum tutorials.
Here's the actual Download page for it:
AnarethoS Place
Yeah it was in the first Windows.OLD I've been transferring my files all day. I'm gonna try and just format my hard drive after they're all gone and transfer them back. It's probably gonna be awhile I have 32 GB of music and 16 GB of production tools to move over. I hope that formatting it works.Your User folder would be in the last one of those... Save that, get rid of all the others (after making sure that something important is not in the prior User folders).
Should not take more than 4 hours, I have a data set that's 450 Gig, it takes the most of 8 hours to copy over, from USB to USB. From Sata to Sata, it still takes about 4 hours. Use "Teracopy" it's a lot faster.